Hey Guys and Gals-

I stumbled across this article on Yahoo Sports about 2008 Season Predictions.  Get this, 2 of the 3 sportswriters on the site picked the A's to win LESS THAN 70 GAMES.  Are they serious?  Or am I blind in my fandom?

Y! experts peer into a crystal baseball

Wow.

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After the trade deadline had passed, I wound up over here, to see if any of our players had been traded.  I knew that Dan Johnson, Joe Kennedy, Shannon Stewart, Mark Kotsay, and even Mike Piazza would receive little print on ESPN or another news source.  Why?  Because I'm going to state the obvious here: Most of our players just do not have value.

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Yikes, this is not good for our bullpen:

Duke out with season ending hip surgery

I for one kind of saw this coming.  But who didn't?  His performance indicated to me and to others that something was seriously wrong.  He's been a great bullpen arm for us, but the question is for this season, who is going to fill his spot?  Casilla?  Embree when Street comes back?  Platoon role?

What about the rest of our bullpen?  I hope Calero comes back just so we can at least have some depth.  Thankfully Casilla has been effective and will hopefully fill in.  Still, it's a huge loss, and we can't afford any more injuries.  (that was Captain Obvious speaking, over and out.)

Jack Cust has won over the hearts of Oakland fans and captured the attention of a nation with his penchant for the clutch and the dramatic.  His homeruns have sullied the records of opposing clubs and helped Oakland to a dramatic rise in offensive production.  He also out-homered the Jason Kendall of the last 3 years in one game.  What a stud.

I thought of a few good nicknames in my spare time here in Arizona and I think it's high time that Mr. Cust had an official calling card.  What should it be?  Please vote and write-in your favorites below.

I was talking with a friend of mine today and we engaged in a debate about statistical analysis.  Being an A's fan, it's difficult not to get caught up in the intense debate between statheads (Bill James and so forth) and the Joe Morgans of the world.  My two cents:

The emphasis on statistical analysis has gone way beyond what I can take.  Baseball is an athletic contest; let's not make it into a computer game.  You can easily inflate average players based on statistical analysis.  Take Kevin Youkilis for the Red Sox as a prime example of a high OBP player that would be considered valuable as an offensive player.  Pretty good hitter with a patient eye, we all know this from watching games.  However, we also know from observation that he's slow.  He's a below average fielder, both at 1B and at 3B.  Would you take him over Eric Chavez?  You'd have to be nuts to say yes, despite Youkilis' 40 point OBP career advantage.  There are so many ways to evaluate a good baseball players, some that even metrics can't agree on (defensive range and arm, fielding prowess, speed on the basepaths, etc.).  It also doesn't take someone with a Ph.D in Statistics to tell you that Adrian Beltre isn't really that good of a hitter, despite his one great year playing for the Dodgers.  His swing is raw and he still regularly tries to pull pitches on the outer half, rolling over the top and creating routine groundouts.  Statistics would say that the season was an outlier, but that isn't hard to figure out if you didn't watch baseball on a regular basis.

Now, I understand that part of the hype is due to the old school crowd making baseless statements like: "Moneyball advocates not stealing bases."  Statistically, I've heard stealing is beneficial when you're successful anywhere around 75-80% of the time.  Logically, this makes sense.  You steal a base when you think you're going to be successful most of the time.  But, this is what you've been trying to do anyway, you wouldn't do it if you weren't good at it. All statisticians are saying is that if you're good at stealing bases, go ahead. If you're not, don't bother. David Ortiz is a not a good basestealer; you wouldn't have him steal regularly.  Not very hard to reason through something like that.  And all putting a stopwatch on Pudge's throw to second is doing is reinforcing the fact that he's really good at getting the ball there quickly and that you probably don't have much of a chance of making it to second unless you're Rickey Henderson.  So, I'm trying to find the middle ground here.  I can't stand ignorance from either extreme.

Statistics to me are just common sense put in numerical format.  What really bothers me about some is that they pretend to predict the future based on statistics.  People try to extrapolate what will happen based on past stats.  That is not the point of statistics; statistics are useful to formulate probabilities for certain events to give confidence to hypotheses and predictions.  Using them as an end-all solution is not only crazy, it's incorrect.  I can't sit here and tell you that Eric Chavez will hit 30 HRs next year.  I can say confidently that he could, because he averages that many HRs, but he could hit 45 after fixing a swing fault, or he could be dealing with a degenerative shoulder and only hit 20.  Baseball is random and human; no analysis will change that fact.

I just hope we don't all lose the point of watching baseball.  It is a beautiful game.  I cannot describe all of the memories I've had playing it and watching it with numbers.  Why should I change my thought process?

I don't know if anyone else has posted this yet, but I found this via google:

http://www.cleveland.com/weblogs/miltonbradley/

I for one am looking forward to Bradley getting here, he seems like a real team player given what he's written in this diary.  I also love the fire that he'll bring to the club, and I commend Billy Beane for bringing a player of his caliber to Oakland for such a low cost.  The only question mark is his ability to stay healthy, other than that, this is a guy that's played hurt, plays with passion, and is very, very talented.  I can't wait for Opening Day 2006.

In watching the A's games over MLB.TV since I am currently in the lovely town of Durham, NC for school, I have come to the conclusion that there are some really, really, horrifically bad announcing crews that we have to sit through as loyal fans.  So I'm posing the poll question, which announcing crew would you least like to watch or even show up for your son's little league game for some good old fashioned play-by-play and color commentary?